Conversations and explorations on worship, culture and the emerging church with Troy Kennedy from newworship.com.

September 11, 2006

Genuinely Useful Software

Do you find yourself buying a number of software titles with the good intentions of better efficiency and time usage only to install them and use them a couple of times. Either they don't do what was promised, or they are unstable, or the learning curve was so steep it wasn't worth it.

Here is my list of software that I (and my team) actually use on a daily if not weekly basis. Genuinely useful software. Keep in mind these are all for Mac.

Itunes - How could this not change the way you do everything in media? Music, video, podcasts and soon movies. Sharing over the network.

OSX Address book, ical and mail. Free with the operating system and just as good if not better than Outlook (Entourage) Plus the ability to sync with .mac and subscribe too other mac users address books and calendars. We use this all the time in my office.

Speaking of .mac - We use the .mac account for our worship arts website, blog, podcast, file sharing and idisk pretty much everyday. Totally worth the $99 a year.

Pages - The mac hybrid of Word and Pagemaker. Great templates that can be adapted for your own particular uses. As a department we have pretty moved from Word to Pages. Everything just looks better and easier to get it there. For $80 you get Pages and Keynote. (Keynote is pretty much a Power Point killer, by the way.)

Reason - It has dramatically changed the way we approach arranging for our music team. Great tool.

Pro Tools - The industry standard for a reason. It works.

Final Cut Pro - Professional video editing for all of us.

Photoshop - Forget about it.

Finale - again, the industry standard. It does the job.

Flock - Safari is a great browser, but Flock marries blogging and surfing in an intuitive way.

Word and Excel - We use them when we have to, which is becoming less and less frequent.

MyMind - A really nice and free mind mapping application for mac.

What are yours? What has really been a time saver for you or has added great value for the effort? Any hot tips to pass along?

Some Favorite Reads

Rob Bell: Velvet ElvisGreat book. I would love to see more from Rob. Very insighful and fresh from and innovative and young master teacher. Highly recommended. (*****)

Donald Miller: Blue Like JazzI want to buy a case of these and give them to friends. Donald has a way of articulating the way many of us have felt in the church. A very rich, funny, and poignant read. (*****)

C.S. Lewis: Mere ChristianityLife changing for me. I started reading Lewis in college and have been extraordinarily impacted by him. He has been something of a spiritual Father for me. My first glimpse at intelligent and articulate Christianity. (*****)